Do We Need To Rethink The Athletics?

Back in January, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported on the future of the Athletics, suggesting a big jump in payroll was coming over the horizon. However, Rosenthal himself expressed serious doubt that any of it would actually come to pass.

“According to a source briefed on their plans,” Rosenthal wrote at the time, “the A’s project payrolls in the $130 to $150 million range during the ramp-up period before they move into their new park, then $170 million-plus once they are established in their fixed-roof stadium.”

Rosenthal remained skeptical of what he was hearing and even titled the piece “Why I remain skeptical about the A’s grandiose Vegas plans.” The skepticism, from Rosenthal or anyone else reading it, was and is completely understandable. Owner John Fisher has done little to earn any benefit of the doubt. In fact, he had given plenty of people to do the opposite.

Since Fisher took over as the club’s managing partner in November of 2016, the A’s have arguably received more attention for their bolt to Las Vegas than their on-field performance. They did put a nice run together from 2018 to 2020, making the playoffs three straight years. But when their win total dropped modestly to 86 in 2021, it was full-blown fire sale time. Matt Chapman, Chris Bassitt, Sean Manaea and Matt Olson were traded prior to the 2022 season, with Sean Murphy, Cole Irvin, Frankie Montas and others to follow.

The A’s have been one of the worst teams in baseball over the past three years while the headlines have mostly been about the club abandoning its fans in Oakland and the surrounding area, absconding to the east. The plan is for a new stadium to open in Las Vegas for the 2028 season, with a three-year stopover in a Triple-A ballpark in West Sacramento. The club didn’t seem to have much interest in staying in Oakland, as negotiations for a new stadium there didn’t gain much traction. Nor did the talks about staying beyond the end of the lease, even on an interim basis, hence the temporary move to West Sacramento.

Given the way the franchise has behaved, it’s natural to doubt that there is some massive pivot coming. According to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, their payroll has been in the bottom third of the league for over a decade now, including being dead last for the past two years and 29th in 2022.

Getting up to the range described by Rosenthal above would be a massive jump. The club had a payroll of just $61MM in 2024, so we’re talking about more than doubling that. The franchise record payroll was $92MM back in 2019, so the proposed numbers are coming close to doubling that as well.

While that kind of leap might be extreme, it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario where Fisher is more motivated to support the Las Vegas Athletics than he was the Oakland Athletics. Even if he doesn’t care about the team or its fans in a direct sense, there’s the cold-hearted business angle. If you’ve seen the movie Major League, you get the gist here. The recent lack of investment in the club may have been an intentional way of lowering fan engagement, thus manufacturing the justification for the move.

After going through all the trouble of moving the club, all the paperwork and meetings involved, he’s undoubtedly hoping for some kind of benefit at some point. Per Mick Akers of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Fisher family are willing to put down roughly a billion of the $1.5 billion needed to build the stadium. Akers says that U.S. Bank reviewed the Fisher family finances and “concluded the Fishers have more than sufficient assets for the equity required to fund the stadium’s construction.”

That’s not especially surprising, considering the family situation. John’s parents Donald and Doris founded The Gap, the clothing chain. Donald died in 2009 but Forbes lists the family net worth as just under $9 billion, with John Fisher personally listed as having a net worth of just over $3 billion.

That gives them plenty of ability to pay for the stadium, but it seems fair to assume they’re not doing that out of the kindness of their hearts and envision getting that money back someday. It’s been speculated that the Vegas setting might mean the club is relying more on tourists to come to games as opposed to locals, when compared to other franchises. If that’s the case, there could be motivation to make more of an effort to sign stars and generate interest outside of Vegas. Many clubs are hemorrhaging TV money as the cable model collapses and the A’s reportedly got $70MM as part of their deal in 2024. That deal is supposed to end if the club leaves the Bay Area though it’s been reported that they may be able to rework it for the West Sacramento years, although presumably at a lower price point.

They will presumably find a new broadcast deal for Vegas down the line, but likely not at that price point. That will only put more pressure on the club to make money off attendance. Their new stadium only projects to have a capacity of 33,000, which will be the lowest in the majors and barely half of the stadium they are leaving. If they want to charge big money for tickets, they will need big demand. Ideally for ownership, that demand would be big right from the get-go, so winning some games while in West Sacramento could be a big priority.

We can’t know if this is actually the case, but perhaps it’s worth considering. The family largesse which allows the Fishers to cover the stadium costs could also allow them to run higher payrolls than they have in the past. They could simply decide to become a mid-market club if they wanted to. Many will take a “believe it when I see it” approach to this speculative scenario and that’s probably the smartest position to take, but there’s an argument that it’s in the Fishers’ own interest to take this path. Even if you’re the type of fan who considers John Fisher to be a cold-blooded lizard person with no warm feelings towards baseball or people, which would be understandable if you’re from Oakland and he has stolen your team from you, that wouldn’t necessarily conflict with him putting a good team on the field since that would be a good business decision.

These are all big ifs but they could have significant ramifications if there’s even partial truths within them, including shaking up baseball’s winter landscape. One more club willing to give out big contracts would be good for the players, as another bidder always helps with the supply-and-demand equation.

RosterResource has the club projected for $37MM next year, meaning they would have to spend over $20MM just to get up to 2024’s last-place figure. Many free agents won’t be excited about playing in a Triple-A park, so the A’s might have to wait out the market and pitch themselves to guys who don’t find the contract they were looking for. Taking on unwanted contracts from another club via trade would be another option to add payroll, without the player having a say in it. But that could also work to the benefit of players, as the other club could use their freed-up spending capacity to spend on someone else.

The American League West already has four fairly aggressive teams in it. The Astros have been one of the strongest clubs over the past decade. The Rangers spent aggressively in recent years, leading to a World Series title. The Angels haven’t been successful lately but it’s not for lack of trying, as they’ve been a top ten payroll club for most of this century. The Mariners don’t run massive payrolls but are one of the most active clubs on the trade market and have finished above .500 for four straight years. If the A’s take things up a notch, it could ramp up the level of competition in an already-strong division.

Despite the behavior of ownership, there have been some encouraging signs on the field lately for the A’s. They went 39-37 in the final three months of 2024, bolstered by strong performances from players like Mason Miller, Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler and plenty of others.

If the club didn’t care about how it performed during its three-year exodus in West Sacramento, it would make sense to trade Rooker, since he’s slated for free agency after 2027. But they didn’t trade him at the deadline and general manager David Forst recently said they don’t plan to trade him this winter either. As mentioned, they don’t need to save money because there’s almost nothing on the books, but trading Rooker could surely bring in a haul of prospects that they are deciding not to reel in. That aligns with Forst recently saying the club is focused on adding to the major league roster, not trading big leaguers for prospects.

Whether the club has enough talent to compete in the immediate future is obviously debatable and depends on many factors. One of them is how much the club spends on bolstering the roster in that time frame. The general expectation of many people seems to be that the A’s will be as cheap as they have been in Oakland but it’s possible to imagine that they have been intentionally waiting to leave town before opening the proverbial purse strings. This would be especially frustrating for the fans in the Bay Area who have watched the club be starved for years, only to see them start living high on the hog after bolting. But after how much they’ve been hurt by Fisher already, would they really be that surprised?